Restaurant Website Development for Multi-Location Dining Group Client: The Emeril Group | New Orleans, LA
Project Role
Restaurant Website Development for Multi-Location Dining Group
- Restaurant Website Development
- Custom WordPress Development
- Multi-Platform Reservation Integration
- ADP Careers Portal Integration
- Gift Card System Integration
- On-Site SEO Optimization
The Emeril Group is celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse’s restaurant company, headquartered in New Orleans and operating a portfolio of more than nine dining concepts across New Orleans, Las Vegas, Florida, and Carnival Cruise ships. Founded over three decades ago, the company has grown from a single New Orleans flagship into one of the most recognized names in American culinary culture — ranging from the iconic Emeril’s on Tchoupitoulas Street to Delmonico Steakhouse in Las Vegas and Emeril’s at Sea aboard Carnival. As the brand expanded, the group needed a corporate digital presence that could carry the weight of that legacy while serving a modern, mobile-first audience across every concept.
Chainlink Marketing was engaged as the development partner on a full rebranding initiative led by design agency Neiter Creative. Chainlink’s scope covered all WordPress development — building the site architecture, configuring the custom modular CMS back-end, and implementing every third-party integration. That work included dual reservation systems (OpenTable and Resy, each intelligently routed to the correct location), ADP recruiting connectivity surfacing per-location job listings, and a gift card purchase and balance-check flow. Accessibility compliance and full mobile responsiveness were built into the front-end implementation from the outset, ensuring the site met modern web standards across every device at launch.
The result is a corporate hub that simultaneously performs multiple business functions: routing fans of the Emeril brand to the right dining concept, converting casual browsers into reservation holders, attracting hospitality talent through location-specific career listings, and driving gift card revenue across the portfolio. The modular WordPress architecture ensures The Emeril Group’s marketing team can update menus, press coverage, and restaurant details across every concept without developer involvement — a meaningful operational advantage for a company managing restaurants in multiple cities, an international airport, and on Carnival Cruise ships.
Challenge & Solution
The Challenge
The Solution
Scalable Multi-Location Restaurant Architecture
Chainlink built a custom, modular WordPress back-end that allows The Emeril Group’s marketing team to manage content across all restaurant locations independently, including updating menus, operating hours, press coverage, and brand assets without developer involvement. Each concept in the portfolio has its own editable content space, while remaining visually unified under The Emeril Group brand. The architecture is designed to scale, making it straightforward to add new restaurant concepts as the group continues to expand nationally.
Multi-Platform Reservation Integration
Rather than forcing all locations onto a single booking platform, the site routes diners to the correct system — OpenTable for Meril and the Las Vegas restaurants, Resy for Emeril’s and The Wine Bar at Emeril’s — through a global reservations widget accessible from any page. This approach preserves the operational setup each restaurant already uses while giving guests a seamless, frictionless path from discovery to booking, regardless of which platform sits underneath.
Location-Based Careers Portal with ADP
The Emeril Group careers section connects to ADP’s recruiting platform with dedicated job listing links for each individual restaurant — Emeril’s, Meril, Delmonico Steakhouse, and Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House — allowing candidates to browse and apply by location. This integration eliminates the need for a standalone recruiting site and keeps hospitality talent acquisition central to the brand’s digital footprint, under the group’s own domain.
Gift Card Purchase & Balance Integration
The site supports direct gift card purchases through a third-party gift card platform, integrated into a dedicated page that defines which restaurants participate, handles e-gift delivery, and supports balance checks — all without leaving the branded experience. For a multi-location restaurant group, gift cards serve as both a revenue channel and a brand loyalty tool, making the purchase flow a meaningful business function and a natural extension of the dining experience Emeril’s brand promises.
Restaurant Group Website Development: Common Questions
Building a website for a multi-location restaurant group requires a modular CMS architecture that lets each location’s content — menus, hours, reservation links, and career listings — be managed independently without affecting the rest of the site. On The Emeril Group project, Chainlink built a custom WordPress back-end that gave the marketing team full editorial control across every concept in the portfolio. The site architecture is also designed to scale, making it straightforward to add new restaurant concepts without a full rebuild. The key is separating location-level content from brand-level content at the data model stage.
The most widely used restaurant reservation platforms are OpenTable, Resy, Tock, and SevenRooms, and multi-location groups often use more than one. On The Emeril Group website, Chainlink integrated both OpenTable and Resy, routing each location to the platform that restaurant actually uses operationally: Resy for Emeril’s and The Wine Bar at Emeril’s, OpenTable for Meril and the Las Vegas properties. This approach preserves each restaurant’s existing booking workflows while presenting guests with a single, unified reservations entry point on the corporate site, regardless of which platform sits underneath.
A common challenge for restaurant groups is surfacing the right openings for the right location without overwhelming visitors who are only interested in one city. On The Emeril Group project, Chainlink integrated ADP’s recruiting platform, connecting each restaurant location to its own dedicated ADP job listing feed. Candidates navigate to the Careers page, identify the restaurant they want to work at, and apply directly, all within the branded experience. For growing restaurant groups, this kind of integration reduces reliance on standalone recruiting sites and consolidates talent acquisition under the brand’s main domain.
Yes — gift card functionality can be integrated directly into a restaurant website using third-party gift card platforms that handle purchase processing, digital delivery, and balance checks. The Emeril Group website includes a dedicated gift card page powered by an embedded third-party system, allowing guests to purchase e-gift cards valid across participating restaurants and check their balance in one place. Contact Chainlink to discuss how gift card integration and other revenue-generating features can be incorporated into your restaurant group’s website from day one.
The cost of a restaurant group website depends on scope, number of locations, and the complexity of integrations required. A corporate hub for a multi-location group with a custom CMS, dual reservation platform integrations, a careers portal, and a gift card system typically falls in the $25,000–$60,000+ range for development, depending on whether design is included or handled by a separate partner. Ongoing maintenance, SEO, and content updates are generally scoped separately. Every Chainlink project is estimated based on the specific deliverables required.
Celebrity chef restaurant groups face a specific digital challenge: the brand is inseparable from the individual, but the site must also function as a practical hub for booking, hiring, and purchasing, not just brand storytelling. On The Emeril Group project, the site architecture supports editorial storytelling about Emeril Lagasse’s culinary legacy alongside fully functional transactional tools, all within a single WordPress installation. Structuring the site this way means visitors who arrive via brand searches can move seamlessly into the booking or gift card flow without navigating away to a separate property.